“Some day my prince will come / Some day we’ll meet again
And away to his castle we’ll go / To be happy forever I know.”–“Some Day My Prince Will Come” from
Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
In 1974, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote a book called Woman Hating, in which she discusses some of the ways in which, in her view, culture and history work to promote a hatred of women. She dedicates an entire chapter to a discussion of fairytales. In the conclusion to that chapter she writes:
The moral of the story should, one would think, preclude a happy ending. It does not. The moral of the story is the happy ending. It tells us that happiness for a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who is good—inert, passive, victimized—and that a good woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.
Dworkin’s view is not unique, nor even the first time that the treatment of women in fairytales was explored and criticized. In her influential 1949 book The Second Sex, existentialist Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “Woman is Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, she who receives and submits. In song and story the young man is seen departing adventurously in search of a woman; he slays the dragon, he battles giants; she is locked in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, she is chained to a rock, a captive, sound asleep: she waits.”
Even if you don’t agree with their conclusions, it is difficult to read reviews of fairytales and fairytale inspired books or movies without encountering some analysis of their treatment of gender. And, when a book or movie dares to incorporate a female heroine, such as Pixar’s Brave or Disney’s Frozen, the actions and motivations of those characters are feverishly dissected and analyzed for how well they do or do not advance the genre’s historical treatment of women. Forbes entitled a 2012 review, “Brave Is Actually Quite Brave: Pixar’s Fantastic Feminist Document.” Mayim Bialik (of The Big Bang Theory fame) nearly exploded the internet recently when she questioned Frozen’s feminist credentials. And, if you’ve read some my previous articles, you will know that this author is not immune to the temptation.
So, what is it about fairytales that inspires such spirited social commentary?
Perhaps it is that these stories inhabit a unique place in our culture. They are traditionally some of the first things that we read and that are read to us, as children—and the movies based on them, and particularly the Disney film library, make up a significant part of our shared generational memories. If you’re around 30 years old, then it is likely that your childhood was defined by movies like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King (Hakuna matata, my friends!) If you are a decade younger, then Pixar’s filmography is probably your touchstone. (“Eevah” indeed, WALL-E.) As a result, people feel a personal ownership of these fairytales that they don’t feel for less universal stories.
The tragedy is that, though we are all exposed—often and early—to fairytales, most of us are only aware of a tiny fraction of the hundreds of fairytale stories published centuries ago by the Grimms, Perrault, Andersen, and others. Take the original Brothers Grimm collection; it contained 209 stories, and Andrew Lang compiled over 400 stories in his many-colored fairy books. However, despite this wealth of material, if you were to ask most people to name a fairytale, odds are they would list one of a handful of stories that have been repeatedly popularized over the years—Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, etc. More unfortunately, the works that have survived the years often tell the same story: girl is pretty, girl is in trouble, boy saves girl, girl and boy live happily ever after. (Except, that is, for The Little Mermaid, which follows the same script but replaces the happy part with soul-crushing sadness and loss…)
Confirmation of this highly selective selection process can be found by examining the Disney animated movies, starting, of course, with Snow White and currently ending with Frozen. Because I know that a temptation to Disney-bash often creeps into such discussions, I want to state upfront that this list comes from a place of love. I grew up going to theaters and watching in breathless amazement as Maleficent turned into a mighty dragon, only to be slain by Prince Phillip’s sword through the heart. I urged Snow White not to eat the apple, and I laughed at the antics of Cinderella’s mice friends. However, this doesn’t take away from the fact that I could wish that Disney had managed to inject a little more variety into the women and girls they portrayed. With that preface, and solely for your amusement, I give you a Jack’s-eye view of the last seventy-seven years of Disney movies.
Entirely Subjective and Incomplete Timeline of Disney’s Animated Movies
1930s: Disney’s first full-length animated movie, Snow White, is the princess movie against which all others are judged. It introduces a heroine who is the “fairest in all the land,” a hero called Prince Charming, and even an evil sorceress queen who transforms into an old hag. Perfection of a sort, but it also sets the pattern for the types of female fairytale characters Disney was interested in telling stories about, a pattern—as we shall see—that continues for decades.
1940s: Not counting Mickey and Donald vehicles, Disney released three animated movies in the 1940s: Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. None of these movies had a female character that was central to the action, except, perhaps, the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio. However, it would be hard to argue that Pinocchio is not clearly the active hero of the story: he goes to Pleasure Island, he turns half-way into a donkey, and he journeys into the belly of Monstro to save Geppetto. The Blue Fairy merely shows up at the end to pick up the pieces.
1950s: The fifties were bracketed by adaptations of two quintessential fairytale stories, Cinderella in 1950 and Sleeping Beauty in 1959. Both continued the trend of selecting out of the fairytale canon stories in which the heroine is passive, and in which rescue occurs only by the intervention of an external male actor. One could argue that the fairy godmother in Cinderella is an active agent in Cinderella’s rescue; however, she constrains the use of her powers to the task of getting Cinderella to the ball so that she can have a chance of meeting her (oddly never named) prince. Between these stories we also have adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Lady and the Tramp. None of these are traditional fairytales, and none change the basic pattern of active male heroes and passive female heroines. Alice might be considered active, or at least not passive, but her activity is illusory (she is asleep and dreaming the whole time), and it is driven entirely toward trying to return to her home in Victorian-era England, where women’s roles were crushingly limited, as she herself seems to recognize at the outset of the story when she wishes to instead be in a world of ‘nonsense.’
1960s: The sixties brought us 101 Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone, and The Jungle Book. None are traditional fairytales. Moreover, the later stories are dominated by little boys—one who will become a king and another learning to master his jungle home—and the first has no central heroic character, although it does introduce the best female villain of all time—Cruella De Vil. (Sing it with me: “Cruella De Vil, Cruella De Vil, if she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will!”) The point being, there are no female heroines to talk about here.
1970s: Four animated movies were released by Disney in the seventies: The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Rescuers, and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Only Robin Hood could be considered analogous to a fairytale, and the only major female character is Maid Marian, who waits patiently for Robin Hood to “sweep her off her feet and carry her off in style.” By the way, I know that Winnie is a girl’s name, but as Christopher Robin explains, I think quite patiently, to his father when asked about Winnie’s gender:
When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, ‘But I thought he was a boy?’
‘So did I,’ said Christopher Robin.
‘Then you can’t call him Winnie.’
‘I don’t.’
‘But you said…’
‘He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?
Exactly, Christopher.
1980s: Most of Disney’s movies from the eighties were stories about male characters: boy fox and boy dog make friends (The Fox and the Hound), boy saves kingdom (The Black Cauldron), boy mouse saves girl (The Great Mouse Detective), and boy cat saves girl (Oliver and Company). However, the end of the decade saw the release of The Little Mermaid, a movie that many credit with reinvigorating the studio, and which also saw Disney return to its roots in fairytale. Unfortunately, they returned to a story that, in its original version, may be the most heartbreaking of all time. The Hans Christian Andersen fairytale upon which the movie is based heaps insult upon injury atop its titular Mermaid. Not only does the mermaid lose her voice, but she must suffer agonizing pain (as though she is walking on knife blades) the entire time she is in human form. Then, at the end of the story, when the prince instead marries another, the Little Mermaid, in her despair, throws herself into the sea and turns to foam. Though Disney softened Andersen’s plot considerably, the fact is that you can only do so much with a tale that requires the heroine to suffer that greatly for a man that she does not know.
1990s: Disney started the decade of the nineties off with a bang with the release of Beauty and the Beast. Unfortunately, once again they chose a fairytale that has a heroine whose central role is to fall in love with the titular Beast. Disney followed this movie up with Aladdin, again a fairly traditional story of a princess being forced into marriage, where her only victory seems to be in having the chance to actually choose who she will marry. The Lion King introduced us to spunky and competent Nala, but she is not allowed to rescue her pride and must instead convince Simba to “man up.” The end of the decade was split between three movies with strong male leads—The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Tarzan—and two movies promising female leads—Pocohontas and Mulan. Unfortunately, Pocohontas turns into a traditional romance that is shadowed by the historical figure of Pocohontas, whose life was tragic and ended bitterly, separated from her people and native land by an ocean. Mulan, on the other hand, begins well—and nearly ends well. Mulan defies convention by joining the army, and then shatters gender stereotypes by single-handedly defeating an invading army and saving the emperor. Then she goes home. Waiting there is her father, who is still the head of the household, and the captain of her army unit, who has been invited to tea. We are left to wonder whether all the wonderful things Mulan has just accomplished will mean anything. Will she be treated differently, or will she be expected to fulfill the same role she so resented at the beginning of the movie?
2000s: The new millennium started out with eight years of Disney movies that could not be even remotely considered fairytales: The Emperor’s New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Lilo & Stitch, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, and Bolt. It is not until 2009 that Disney went back to the fairytale well and drew forth The Princess and the Frog. Unfortunately, the plot for The Princess and the Frog is based on the Grimm fairytale The Frog Prince, in which the princess is described early on as being “so beautiful that the sun itself, who, indeed, has seen so much, marveled every time it shone upon her face,” and where the only question is whether she will marry the frog or not. This foundation inevitably forces The Princess and the Frog to become a fairly standard story of “princess marries prince.”
Present Day: Even Disney’s first movie of this decade, 2010’s Tangled, follows the same pattern, introducing us to a pretty cool version of Rapunzel, but ultimately still Rapunzel. There is only so much liberty you can take when the source material chosen is a fairytale in which a man sells his unborn daughter for a bunch of lettuce, and where the girl is then held prisoner her entire life until she is rescued by a wandering prince. At the end of the day Disney’s story also has Rapunzel being rescued from her life of captivity by thief and all-around rake, Flynn, then falling in love with the boy and living with him happily ever after.
So, we have journeyed to the present, or at least the present decade, and thus far the fairytales Disney has chosen to tell us are basically those same fairytales, and their relatives in kind, that Simone de Beauvoir and Andrea Dworkin were criticizing decades ago. The result is that the vast majority of people think that these types of stories are all that fairytale has to offer women.
Fortunately, things do not end there, because the thesis of this article is not that Dworkin and de Beauvoir are unassailably correct in their criticisms of fairytales. Anyone who has read the Grimm Brother’s collection or Lang or Perrault know that female roles in these stories run the gamut from passive to active, from porcelain doll to hardened adventurer, and everything in between—it simply took seventy plus years for modern popular culture to catch up. Finally, in 2012 an amazing thing happened: Pixar released Brave. Here was a movie that, while still beginning with the familiar story of a princess being forced into marriage, at least does not end with the princess succumbing to the pressure of a romantic entanglement. Instead, the story diverges from the traditional and becomes an examination of the relationship between mother and daughter—and quite beautifully, I might add.
Still, while Brave certainly has elements of Scottish folklore woven into it, it does not follow the plot of any identifiable fairytale. But, with last year’s Frozen, Disney finally has given us a glimpse into those previously unread pages of the fairytale world. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, Frozen tells the story of not one, but two kick-butt princesses (still princesses, but you can only ask so much). What is more, much that is admirable about Frozen comes straight from The Snow Queen—no modification necessary. For example, it is from The Snow Queen that we get so many incredible female characters, including our adventurous Gerda (a more liberated version of Anna), and a host of other female helper characters (that are sadly omitted from Frozen), including a wise grandmother, a female crow, a princess that will only marry a prince as intelligent as herself, and a robber’s fearless knife-wielding daughter. What is more, the fairytale sets Gerda on a lone quest to save her platonic playmate, who happens, in a nice role reversal, to be a boy.
More interestingly, the portions of Frozen that have drawn criticism were almost all added by Disney. In Andersen’s version of The Snow Queen there is no Kristoff, there is only Gerda (who is not a princess, by the way). In fact, there is no romantic love story at all; there is no prince, no whirlwind romance, and no betrayal.
That Disney decided to tell Gerda’s story is admirable, but why did it take three-quarters of a century to do it? After all, The Snow Queen was published in 1844, just seven years after The Little Mermaid. Nor is The Snow Queen unique: The Seven Ravens, a story included in the early Grimm Brothers’ collection along with Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, tells the tale of a young girl who discovers that her seven brothers have been put under a curse to live as ravens and decides, on her own, to save them. Over the course of her quest she must venture to the moon and the sun and the stars, and must ultimately chop off her own finger to reach them and break the curse. There is no prince at the end of the story, no marriage, just a sister who braves everything to save her siblings. It is a brilliant story, and one that deserves to be told and retold just as often as The Frog Prince or Snow White, and quite a bit more often than The Little Mermaid.
And these are but a few examples. There are myriad other traditional fairytales where women and girls take it upon themselves—often at great personal risk—to become the heroines of their stories. The real question is not “why don’t fairytales reflect strong and powerful women?” but rather why don’t we read those fairytales that do? Or a better question still, why do we insist on selectively reading only those fairytales that tend to reflect passive female characters?
Fairytale scholar, Jane Yolen, speaks to this issue quite eloquently when she writes:
“What I am suggesting is not to ban or censor the stories. They are great and important parts of Western folk canon. But what I am asking is that we become better readers.”
Perhaps Ms. Yolen is right, and we, the readers and consumers of fairytales, must become more discerning, but I would prefer to emulate Mae West who famously said, “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.” My suggestion is that we drift—drift away from the Snow Whites and the Cinderellas of the fairytale world. Not forever, because there is always room for stories about beautiful girls and handsome princes falling in love and getting married, but at least now and then, because isn’t there also room in the world for girls that travel to the stars and sacrifice their lives and battle with evil sorcerers—not for a prince, but because they can?
Jack Heckel is the writing team of John Peck, an IP attorney living in Long Beach, CA who is looking forward to the upcoming release of Once Upon a Rhyme, and Harry Heckel, a roleplaying game designer and fantasy author, who is looking forward to the publication of Happily Never After.
While I find a few of these a little over-simplistic, you hit the nail on the head with the thing that drives me crazy about Mulan and has since its release. Given all the evidence that we receive throughout the story that Mulan is an athletic, physical-rather-than-passive person with a strong interest in justice (note the brief scene where she deviates from the Matchmaker’s plans to break up a fight between two young children?), WHY OH WHY does she refuse the Emperor’s offer of Chi Fu’s place in the civil service in favor of home life? I understand that Disney was in an awkward place all along between Western values and recognizing the Chinese value of filial piety, but surely service to country in the Confucian meritocracy could have counted as equally Chinese and more in-character?
That ending would also have set her in an interesting dialogue with Li Shang, who, although he is in fact talented, has benefited from highly inappropriate privilege (not all of Chi Fu’s issues with his promotion are without merit, a nice bit of subtlety). Perhaps even keep the romance but end with a marriage in which the wife was better-remembered by history?
You know what I have no idea how to do here? Embeds.
http://youtu.be/Jro6PwOThk4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_1u-ufBYEA
Personally I think there is a lot more room for perspective than you are giving here. Sure you can shoehorn a lot of the most popular fairy tales into the same general plot, but that doesn’t mean they’re not varied in other ways.
Currently my 3-year old daughter is obsessed with Sleeping Beauty. When I’m home with her on the weekends I end up reading her the storybook Disney version about 5 times a day! However she thinks the main character isn’t the princess, it’s the fairies. She can’t remember the names of any of the royal family members, but she always remembers Flora, Fauna, and Merriwether. They’re the ones who change the curse away from death to sleep, raise the princess, put the castle to sleep, rescue and arm the prince, and put the fairy dust on the sword to kill the dragon.
I want her to be very wideread, but criticisms of these stories that bring her joy is so everpresent now that I feel the need to push back when it pops up. Also, my sister that’s a professor of mathematics loved (loves) The Little Mermaid. Just because the source material ends tragically is no reason to disregard the story where the active princess is pursuing the largely passive prince.
I don’t expect agreement, but just putting my voice out there as someone that doesn’t think we should feel bad for unabashedly enjoying the classics.
@5, I like your perspective on Sleeping Beauty as a very female-dominated story if you include the fairies (and indeed Maleficent) as major motive forces. Also, I do think that some interpretations of the film over-focus on the imagery of the final kiss–despite the substantial liberties Disney took with the source material so that the prince is not a stranger and there is, arguably, implicit consent since Aurora had already expressed a desire to be with him–and miss that Aurora herself is a strongly depicted character whose reaction to learning that she is a princess with a beautiful gown. . .is to sink into profound despair leading into catatonic terror at her official crowning because she realizes that her royal status means that her choices will be taken away from her. Has anyone seen the gorgeous new cover for the Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray with a seething Maleficent and a grieving Aurora juxtaposed back-to-back?
Many of these I agree with. Others I see from a different perspective:
1) Cinderella. The prince is nameless and mostly faceless. The men in the story are all shown to be mostly incompetent and unnecessary. It is the three core women of the story who drive it along. Cinderella is her own change agent. She is the one who demonstrates that working with others, rather than crushing them, is a better path to success (something that many businesses are just now embracing). She inspires the mice to help her through mutual respect. Is she an island of success? No, but nobody in reality is.
2) Peter Pan. While Peter is the hero of the film, it’s Wendy who is the matriarch and recieves deference. At least, that’s what I remember. It’s been a while.
3) The Rescuers. Not a fairytale, but it is notable that the men are once again incapable (although Bernard does develop some skill). It is Bianca who drives the story and the rescue, playing the Sherlock to his Watson.
4) The Great Mouse Detective. Speaking of Sherlock, couldn’t this also be a matter of adult rescuing child? Although, it seems to me that the child is the driving force in recuing her father.
5) The Little Mermaid. I deplore this movie, and the “I’m 16, time for an adult relationship” message. Still, she pushes the envelope. Does she get bailed out by her father? Sure. But that’s part of being a parent – you’re always ready to sacrifice the world for your kid. She identifies a new frontier that she wants to explore, a prejudice to be overcome, and she embraces it. Why couldn’t she have been 20 or so. 16…ugh.
6) Beauty and the Beast. I don’t see any major rescue of the girl by the boy. Well, there is the Beast and the wolves, and Chip with the cellar. But these are pretty minor in character development. She rescues him from his depression and inhumanity, but even that isn’t the story that speaks to me. What I see is neither gets rescued by the other. They are two kindred souls who find happiness with each other.
7) Aladdin. This is a strange one. It’s a princess story, but it isn’t about the princess. It’s about Aladdin accepting who he is. Jasmine is the first to do so, nearly at the beginning of the movie. It’s he, Jafar, and the Sultan, that don’t. I think it’s pretty fair to make her a secondary character, just as Charming, NoName, and The Last DragonFighter were.
8) The Lion King. Nala wasn’t looking for Simba. She was looking for help. Other than Simba, I don’t think there was an Army of One (Timon and Pumba, while helpful…) that could have taken on Scar. Simba was needed because it undermined Scar’s foundational authority. As it was, once Simba arrived, it was the lionesses that shook off their malaise and conquered the superior hyena numbers. Simba was busy doing his think with Scar.
9) Princess and the Frog. Useless male drags girl (who didn’t appear to need any rescuing, except from the throes of socioeconomic inequality) into undesired and unwanted situation. They find they can get along, if he matures. He does. Then an firefly dies and an alligator plays jazz.
10) Brave. I have a feeling that male or female, it was a personality that would have made for familial stress. The whole marriage thing felt like a device to explore family relationships. The need for parents to understand their kids are growing and becoming independent, but the need for kids to understand that parents are just trying to leverage years of experience and knowledge of the human condition to make things work. Or maybe that was my take away.
11) Frozen. More men are generally useless, some nice, some not. Worth noting that there is only once princess in this movie – Elsa is made queen before the action really begins.
Now I should get some work done.
Also @5, your sister’s perspective on the Disney version of The Little Mermaid is one interesting way to see it (I would see it as a story about breaking free from parental authority–a theme than runs through an awful lot of recent Disney), but in terms of the “tragic ending”, then we’re into the world of the original Andersen version, and there I think we have a whole other gender dynamic, as the mermaid is really not pursuing the prince for himself, but as a means towards her end of spiritual progress and her own immortal soul. I would say that Andersen’s version is a highly active character who defies the norms of her society in pursuit of something higher that she has intuited.
Great points, Rancho Unicorno. I think what you’re noticing in Aladdin is sort of an accident of production. The original version of Aladdin, which reached a pretty late stage of song composition and storyboarding, really did have the princess as a female version of Prince-No-Name; when it was heavily re-worked relatively late in production, there may just not have been any time to give Jasmine much in the way of personality. . .
Which leads to another of my few long-term beefs with Disney and gender, though mostly I think Rancho Unicorno is spot-on. WHY OH WHY do we see Jasmine enduring Jafar’s presence in the royal household, sensing that he is dangerous but unable to do anything about it, but later on so completely blinded by love that her first question after identifying Aladdin is not “Why did you lie to me?” but the rather more important “Why did JAFAR lie to me and say that you were dead?” And why does she waste the whole morning in a romantic daze instead of running to her father and exposing the lie? I smell plot hole.
It’s all in how you choose to read the story. Yes, the originals all have horrible endings. but it was not just the princesses that came to bad ends in classic Grimm or other fairy tales. The boys lose their thumbs or die horribly too.
Like @@@@@ 5&7 pointed out. If you choose to read and see a different interruption to the story, go for it. That’s why fairy tales are still around a popular. Every generation sees something in the story they can relate to. And if our version is different than that which was poplar 50 years ago, so what? That is why the story is still popular.
I love Sleeping Beauty. The imagery, the two people had meet prior, the super cute animals, the prince has to do something, the fairies are so important to the story. The owl and rabbits dancing with her is my favorite image. Does the princess become inactive, yes. But that’s never what I focus on in the story.
Honestly I’m pissed at Disney for always putting Aurora in pink. I prefer her in blue. But apparently that’s Cinderella’s color, so you can’t cross them in the Disney Princess Line of merchandize.
I have a son (3), and will have a daughter in February. I’m not going to be pushing pink & princess (or diva) agenda. But it will be interesting to see how it does or does not develop due to relatives, school, and friends. And how I counteract the worst bits.
@7, While those messages are there, they also wrapped up in gender essentialist expectations
1) Cinderella, Sure the women are the drivers in the story, and sure while her more feminine approach is what gives the story it’s happy ending, that happy ending is still “Agree to marry a man you barely know, it will work out for you”, which is the ONLY message for girls in these films
2) Peter Pan, continues with the gender essentialist message that “boys will be boys’ and that a woman’s place is cleaning up their messes. Yes Wendy becomes the matriarch, because that’s what women are good for, again, a poisonous message for young girls
3) The Rescuers, Bumbling nebbish is rewarded with the love of a woman far out of his league, this is a commonly repeated trope, and continues to paint women as prizes to be won, instead of fully realized characters in their own right
5) The Little Mermaid, Throw away everything close to you, cut yourself off from your support system, for marriage to a man you barely know, it will work out, which again, is the constant drumbeat to these movies. It makes the sole revolutionary point that parents aren’t always right, one message which doesn’t outweigh the far worse messages in that movie.
6) Beauty and the Beast, The fact that Belle is a more active agent in her story, does not take away that the major theme of this story is that a woman’s love tames a man’s “dark side”, that the solution to an abusive situation is just to “love him more” and stop making him angry. These messages are toxic
8) The Lion King, And yes, the lionesses did defeat the hyenas. Yet they were somehow powerless for years without the catalyst of a man to tell them to do it.
9) Princess and the Frog, and this one would have ended okay, if it hadn’t felt the need to make it a love story. The continued insistence by modern fairy tales that all women characters MUST want love is quite tiresome, and why Frozen was such a breath of fresh air. P&tF was one of the worst, because for such a large part of the movie, Tiana didn’t want to be in love. But of course, silly woman, she didn’t actually know her own mind, and OF COURSE she really wanted love, she just didn’t know it until a man showed her better
10) Brave is one of the more brilliant Princess films, but I feel that owes more to Pixar than Disney
11) Haven’t seen Frozen can’t comment on it
I think one thing that’s influencing this discussion, tying in with the original blog’s comment on the small selection of fairy tales that most people know well at this point compared with the total preserved corpus (has anyone else read Philip Pullman’s scholarly and beautifully written translation/interpretation of Grimm?), is that the most important stock character in Grimm’s Fairy Tales who doesn’t normally appear in Disney features is the male peasant hero, though I’ve heard an interesting idea that “Flynn Rider” resembles this stock character (lowborn, inventive, disrespectful of authority, ascends in wealth and power as a reward) relatively well. Could this be that Disney had already to some large extent used, and Americanized, the Grimm hero as the early Mickey Mouse?
(lowborn, inventive, disrespectful of authority, ascends in wealth and power as a reward)
I find it more likely that a company as dedicated to enforcing our classist status quo found more compelling reasons to exclude that narrative from our movies.
Even when that character does appear, like Flynn Rider in Tangled, he’s painted as untrustworthy until tamed by the love and kindness of a woman.
I find it astonishing how dominant the Disney interpretations of fairy tales seem to be in the US. I have much clearer memories of “Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070832/), which is a version of Cinderella with a female lead that likes hunting and riding, or “Das Kalte Herz” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042627/) than of any of the Disney movies. Even the czech version of The Little Mermaid is more present in my mind than Disneys Ariel. Other fairy tales that were not adapted by Disney, and which do not include most of the boring cliches connected with those movies would be Hans im Glück or Frau Holle… I think that the issues presented here are more a problem of Disney than of fairy tales in general.
I have to point out that at least in the animated version of Beauty and the Beast, Belle was *never* required to “stop making him angry.” Wolf packs notwithstanding, she shouted right back that he was wrong and he was forced to back down. “If you hadn’t scared me wouldn’t have had to run away!” He was scolded by the “adults” in his life that in order to make himself worthy of her, or indeed of civilized company of any sort, “You must control your temper! “Once Upon A Time” took it back to a fairly deplorable Stockholm Syndrome dynamic, but animated Belle never went around cleaning his house and cooking him things so he would like her; she wandered the grounds and amused herself to the best of her ability. Animated Beast had to actually take stock of himself and be nice to Belle before she even began to like him slightly. The emotional transformation was done in song and montage form and thus seemed speeded up in film time (hmm, he’s being nice, maybe he’s not irredeemably d*ckish), but took many days going by the outfit changes, many days of Beast having to alter and control himself in order to prove himself. Belle was not do anything to convince him to improve, he had to grow up, be a sensible adult, and behave himself, and not backslide, under his own steam. The framing story of a girl being hostage to her father’s supposed misdeeds (or, more accurately, baiting and entrapment into a third party’s curse narrative) is unfortunately the framework of the original tale that makes the story recognizable. Which is what happens when you insist on sticking to fairy tales from a different cultural episteme and telling those tales to an audience that cannot universally understand the original context just like that without accompanying history classes.
I can’t say much more here as I’m doing the two thumb cellphone type, and can’t sign in for who knows why,but more in a bit I hope, and apologies for typos I can’t correct once I hit send…
There’s no Kristoff in Andersen’s Snow Queen, but Gerda’s whole motivation to leave in the first place is to rescue her (male) childhood sweetheart, Kai. Yes, they marry at the end.
@17. Yes, this.
I’m fairly certain that in the era most of these tales come out of, a good marriage was a legit happy ending — remaining unmarried wasn’t really an option for most people, male or female, in no small part due to financial realities. Unless a different social institution was joined, such as religious orders. Even today in many cultures there isn’t the whole idea of the “Ball and chain” and the “end of freedom” so common in Hollywood films, but rather marriage is seen as passage into adulthood. Which of course comes with its own problems. I’d like it if “You’re not an adult until” and “ACK, my ball and chain; the Old Lady waiting to nag me at home” were not the only two camps, it seems, for the concept to be sorted into…
Okay, I’m not arguing with anyone here so much as spewing things that have been on my mind for some time.
BRAVE. This film only works for me if I reimagine it so that Elinor is the main character. Elinor has the character arc and growth, learns how to bend, not only for her daughter’s sake but in her own behavior — that appropriate practices are relative to one’s situation. Elinor is the one that actually learns the valid lessons. Merida learns that she can control of roomful of rowdy men by standing up straight and enunciating. Like a princess.
*spits tacks*
Seriously. This is her big transformative moment. *headdesk* With no acknowledgement that she only has this power beacuse of who her father is. This is not a story of a girl coming into any POWER, for pete squeaks — personal or otherwise; internal or external. Blech. Also don’t poison your mother. Jeeze. So this is a story mostly of a girl 1. cleaning up her own mess, and 2. then coming this close to submitting to forced marrige, until Mom (whose story it really is, in my heart) changes her mind. When people talk about the problems with “strong women” in text, where “strong” is strong for a very pseudo value of strength, this is exactly what they are talking about. I don’t blame Merida for this, I like Merida, I blame the writing. (Full disclosure — none of this stops me crying buckets, repeatedly, when mother and daughter are reunited at the end.)
(Edited to add — NEVER allow your friends to watch this film when their mother has just died. This happened. I didn’t know Friend in Question was plannning to do this.)
THE LITTLE MERMAID. I am biased as a person who has loathed the original tale for decades. The original Little Mermaid doesn’t want a husband, she’s not in love with anyone, she doesn’t actually need or want marriage with another person economically or emotionally — she wants a soul. She’s a religious zealot wanting a destiny that is not meant for her, and she needs another person to marry her in order to get it. She gives up her voice and agrees to torture in order to get this. All right, fine, that is her choice and her right. But then we’re meant to hate the prince and think he’s a bad person for not loving her — naughty prince for not loving a silent woman who is standing there being attractive at you, and instead loving a woman who, yanno, converses.
And in the end, her refraining from knifing him to death for not loving her (so she can get her tail back as part of a blood-based magic spell) is presented as some great self-sacrifice. Really!?
The Disney film, in contrast, fixed all the things I hated about the original story. Ariel is obssessed with the idea of the surface world, and of travelling beyond her small (or, at least, all too familiar one) — she becomes infatuated with the prince as a secondary thing, a great deal later. (He is also not really interchangeable with any other prince for her — he isn’t really a path to her goal. If I were super cynical, I coud say he is, in a manner of speaking, another above-world item for her to collect, but I don’t really believe that.) Furthermore, despite what Ursula says, the prince is already in love (well, equally infatuated) with her, and has been looking for her ever since she rescued him — he simply doesn’t recognize her outside of her true (tail and voice-having) form. What she actually has to do is get him to do is recognize her; to kiss her, according to the letter of Ursula’s law. She doesn’t give up her voice willingly, she is tricked out of it. (EDIT: whoops, that’s not true. The voice clause is clearly stated in both versions of the contract. Bad memory, sorry. Andersen’s Sea Witch is simply more matter-of-fact about it.) She doesn’t stand there and passively waft beauty at him — she does, in fact, communicate as best she can, via makeshift sign language. She pulls back her hair… so he can see her face. She makes fishy motions with her hands. She makes an effort, she tries to use above-world things in the right way and blend in *snicker* — she interacts; she makes a hideous, honest face when he butchers her name. (And at least in the stage production, she’s the one who ultimately kills Ursula — apparently this was the original plot, and was changed for the animated film because the writers thought that Eric had bascially nothing to do in the film that would convince anyone that he was Ariel’s equal other than this one moment.)
I also don’t believe that committing a rash action (in response to your dad destroying all your hard-sought/collected stuff — also rash, Jeeze, King Triton) as a maturing teenager without thinking through the consequences is “cutting yourself off from your support system.” In the end, she goes to what is essentially a bordering kingdom to get married. In subsequent — if inferior –sequels she is clearly still in contact with her family, as are her children.
It is not perfect — I actually don’t believe in love at first sight, and I agree that 16 is a bit young to be setting your life in stone, but on the other hand, a major reason we don’t do that nowadays is that we have universities that we can attend (both women and the working classes in general) and a lot more choices of what to learn and make our careers in than farming, homemaking, soldiering, and other basics on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (Not to mention MUCH more efficient transportation with which to take our gap years, or move to places with more opportunities, perhaps, than the towns in which we may have been born.) Sixteen was adulthood for a very long time in human history; this fact doesn’t help young people watching it NOW, in a different cultural millieu, but well, we keep adapting the dang fairy tales…
I do believe Triton is possibly the best father figure Disney has come up with. They have not been consistently good with father figures. (Okay, well, there’s also Mufasa.) I have always disliked the scene with him destroying her things, but he does come across overall as an adult, rather than a mascot or comic relief.
FROZEN. I am so freaking torn about this film. On the one hand, it contains Elsa, who might be my favorite Disney character, hands down, in no small part because not only is she not paired off with a husband by the end of the film, but it never even really comes up — not with any seriousness, never TO Elsa herself, and she’s never shown as having any sort of lack because of it. She’s queen, that’s what she is, and there you go. The issue facing everyone is to have her come back and queen properly. (I accept a lot of love and marriage from Disney because that’s what Disney generally gives me, and usually just hope that they do it in ways which are not egregious, but MAN was this one refreshing.)
On the other hand, the film is working on two levels that don’t quite mesh. Half of the film is a broad satire of Disney’s own formula — love at first sight, joyous duets, true love’s kiss and all that jazz — but played out in such a way that it’s not certain until quite close to the end whether or not they’re going to have the courage of their convictions and actually make it satire. (They do. More or less. They could have gone a little stronger with it, but apparently the show ain’t over till somebody gets kissed.) This half of the film is hilarious, broad humor. Light and nearly slapsticky. At points, close to unbearable — I get embarassed by characters’ onscreen embarassment — but that’s just me. The other half of the film, however, is quite frankly a narrative of borderline child abuse, emotional if not physical, and very obviously not the intent of the well-meaning twit parents, but… the parents remain twit parents. Here is a child with a power, and the parents are told that the girl needs to be taught to control the power or it will get OUT of control and cause disaster, and what do they do? Lock her in a room, make her suppress her abilities, NEVER do anything to get the girl trained, and convince this small child that she is a danger and a menace to everyone by making her memorize aphorisms to that effect. (This is a leftover from when the plot of the film was supposed to be that Elsa was the fulfilment of a malevolent prophecy… but without that prophecy this all becomes a terrible overreaction.) Here is a child the strength of whose power is rooted in the intensity of her emotions. So obviously the best route is to Flowers in the Attic the girl for half her life and make sure she spends the rest of said life in a constant state of nervous apprehension. (Thankfully this is overcome, hence the plot.)
However, ultimately I do appreciate that the “true love” that really matters, and saves the day, is not the romantic kind.
(I also want to moan at length about the reinterpretation of this currently underway on Once Upon a Time, but I feel I ought to do that in a different thread…)
@16,
Belle was *never* required to “stop making him angry.
Yes she was, she had to stop going around the room with the rose, which was the thing that set him off worst.
Great thoughts on The Little Mermaid, @18. Ariel is, basically, a collector and even an intellectual. (Using Stephen Sondheim’s idea that you can judge a musical theater character’s approximate intelligence by their level of wordplay, she is implicitly highly intelligent–“Part of Your World” has an exceptionally difficult rhyme scheme.) Do we perhaps indulge in a bit of sexism by assuming right off the bat that a pretty teenage girl who falls hard for a boy at the (totally hormonally normal) age of 16 can’t possibly also be bright? Her intelligence isn’t signposted the way Belle’s is, but the obsession with unfamiliar objects and their function, the difficulty relating to those who don’t share her passions (despite her dialogue, we don’t see a lot of evidence she is close to her sisters, or to anyone but Flounder). . .that’s pretty textbook gifted teen behavior. And, news flash, gifted teen girls fall in love too.
Getting in a flap over excessively early marriage just gets on my nerves as well. Unless any adapter (I’m not going to say just Disney because the same issue would be present for any theoretical studio) wants to go with a modern-dress update, then if you are going to film a fairytale, you are stuck with the fact that you’re depicting a culture where the age of first marriage was lower than we are comfortable with. Yes, you can handwave as Disney generally has ever since The Little Mermaid and just not mention the heroine’s age, but unless you’ve got some implicit reconning as well (this could work for Beauty and the Beast, where Belle does appear a bit old to be prime marriage material in her culture, but she does also seem to be a less than desirable catch for anyone but Gaston), in the end you probably still have a story that ends with an early marriage. Is it so terrible if parents talk with their children after the film about a little social history and about institutions like college that have made it advisable to marry later? I.e. not use the DVD as a babysitter?
@19, given the genuine damage she could have done, that’s not all that unreasonable. Yes, it would be ideal to TELL an insatiably curious woman exactly why she shouldn’t mess with beautiful and dangerous magical objects in the one spot she isn’t allowed to go, but I think, in line with previous commenters, that the animated version of Beauty and the Beast is fundamentally a story about overcoming isolation and shame, not about “woman tames man”. Everything in that room (especially the portrait which is mutilated but not removed) speaks loudly of the Beast’s long experience of self-hatred and crippling despair. To take this over into the real world: I think we can all agree that loving a genuinely dangerous man is a terrible idea. . .but what about a mentally ill man? Keep in mind that most of the plot holes that remain seem to be remnants of arguments between the directors and Howard Ashman, that were sort of left lying as subtext rather than flawlessly ironed out, about whether the Beast’s “punishment” was anything like justified or proportionate. (Ashman wanted it to be something much closer to a single moment of poor judgment with unimaginable consequences, and Glen Keane’s animation goes much better with that interpretation.)
And, with previous commenters, none of this applies on OUAT. I think (hope?) that we are supposed to be more than a little squeamish about that version of Belle, who seems to have made a horrible category mistake between “deserving of love generally and not necessarily romantically” and “good marriage partner”, and to have entered marriage based on a lie she can’t really be blamed for believing. It was pretty convincing. Honestly, I think the only good direction the writers have left to go is the daring one, which would be that it ends very, very badly.
@18 — I can’t put these on the same level. Firstly, this is used as an example of the Beast acting horribly early on in the film, demonstrating the base point he needs to rise up from, the thing he needs to alter (screaming, yelling, overreaction, poor communication skills) in order to become worthwhile. Secondly, “don’t touch the artifact that could destroy everyone here, or at least keep them trapped in hell-limbo” is not an example of having to change herself (she would still have to not damage the artifact — everyone is obligated to not damage the artifact, including the Beast, really; the only point demonstrated there is that the Beast should have explained nicely like an adult to an adult). Whereas “transform your terrible personality and learn to talk to people and interact like an intelligent person or no one will be friends with you” is a definite example of self-change.
You know what I do when my daughter could have gotten into a genuinely damaging situation? Not do what the Beast did.
Regarding whether or not the Beast was damaged, is really irrelevant. Plenty of people are damaged, and still don’t resort to violence and threatening people to achieve their healing.
Am I the only one that always thought the princes were rather useless in Snow White and Cinderella?
Snow was foolish, but it was also made a really long time ago.
The only thing the prince did for Cinderella was dance with her and send out his men.
So I’ve always seen the girls as more active in thier stories. That may not be the common viewpoint, but it works for me.
@14: Thank you for pointing out views besides the ones common in the US.
Re: Frozen – thank the song writers. There are many stories floating around the internet about how the song “Let it Go!” changed the whole story line. They had to re-write the movie once that song clicked and made them realize the direction the story’s Snow Queen had to truly take.
Re: B&B – I can’t find it currently, but there is another story on the web that makes you re-think the Beast. Because, unless he stopped ageing, and was a 20 something prince when he was turned into the Beast, the story is crazy. Someone did the math. If he was ageing with the rose, that meant the witch cursed a 10-12 year old boy for not opening his door to a stranger. Which is something every parent teaches their kid not to do.
What 10-12 year old kid has perfect manners and social skills?
@Aeryl
If you look at the content of the original fairy tale there is no indication of threat from the Beast against Belle. So if there is a moral message to be condensed from that story it is not what you are implying.
@@@@@ 23 The Beast isn’t Belle’s father though. He’s 1. a peer, with a comparable level of maturity and life experience and 2. a dumbass who has to become different. You are not, so of course you wouldn’t act like that. This isn’t a lesson for you.
Plus, she doesn’t stop “making him angry” after that. She doesn’t even try. She goes directly from that bit to shouting right back at him — justifiably — after the wolf incident. “If you hadn’t frightened me, I wouldn’t have run away!”
Damage or no damage, or just inherent assholery based on being an ass, the Beast is the one who has to change. (The Beast isn’t damaged, by the way — he’s a spoiled selfish prince brat who is being punished for being spoiled and selfish and a brat. The curse is broken when he reforms himself enough to be accepted by other peers.) Nothing about the film says that he’s correct in his behavior — the whole film is based on the premise that violence and threatening are bad and counterproductive things that he should make a conscious effort to stop doing in order to have any semblance of a decent life or a respectable character that other people can stand to deal with.
I’m tempted to even go a step farther and call this a boy’s film, sadly betrayed/undermined by its marketing nearly exclusively to girls via merchandising choices. “Intimidation and assholery are the WRONG things to do in order to make people like you, young men who might not know this” (or abusers belonging to other genders, but the script is the script and it is not nuanced). I am not going quite that far, but I am very tempted.
The one thing Belle is called upon to do within herself is forgive him when he demonstrates real actual change (not fake change like “I wasn’t in control of myself” or “I’m sorry you made me angry”). Real change, as in not behaving that way, EVER again. I personally am not big on second chances in my own life (I’m a bit mean), but I don’t think that second chances are an inherently bad thing to have in the world in general, nor are they Belle changing herself to suit anyone.
One damaging thing I could see would be the reinforcement of a belief that the Beast COULD just change on his own willpower without benefit of therapy, but I think Lumiere and Mrs. Potts are a somewhat adequate stand in for a real-world counselor.
But stories with everyone doing everything perfectly right away aren’t stories. They are anecdotes, or sermons, perhaps. When the story is character-driven, someone has to make a mistake. Something character-based has to be addressed. Someone has to start out wrong and be corrected. That someone is Beast, not Belle. There is nothing wrong with Belle.
@@@@@21 — I think OUaT’s Belle storyline is irreparably regressive. They’ve gotten away with as much as they have because Robert Carlyle is a choice actor, but they do a LOT of resting on actor talent rather than sense in that franchise.
@24 — This is very true about the age-math. I believe that was an oversight by the writers! They do seem to have tried to handwave this a little by having the enchanted staff point out that nothing ever changes, so I can accept that premise being extended to mean that a 20-something prince was caught in a magical stasis.
Also — again, one of those values that was common “back in the day” but not so much in the modern world of this current audience — guest right would have been a major moral duty at that point, especially for a ruler, and the prince would not have been alone but surrounded by staff and soldiers. Further, in several cultures, failing to do it would be a hideous blow to one’s reputation. Leaving someone outside in a lot of places with harsh weather (perhaps not necessarily France, at least in the south, but the film does show some snow) would be a death sentence, wheras now, for a variety of reasons, we fear the stranger at our door.
One thing maac has been implying that I’d like to say a bit more about is the idea of “adult community”. I do think that’s also extremely important to the structure of Beauty and the Beast, for both characters. As maac pointed out in his last post, the Beast does have a basically adult support network available to him if he should choose to use it. And is it perhaps not so surprising that Belle, who has been living in a fundamentally adolescent community that is alarmingly reminiscent of a bad high school despite the biological ages of all the major and minor characters, quickly comes to feel comfortable living with actual grownups like Lumiere and Mrs. Potts? (P.S.–is it perhaps also significant that the main person in favor of determinedly keeping her in the dark about facts is Cogsworth, who is conspicuously absent from maac’s list of positive adult figures? Lumiere at least is practically Captain Infodump to the possible extent that he can get away with it under his boss’ eye.)
Cogsworth is the obstructive administrator. ;-)
@25, We are discussing the ways in which the Disney versions have corrupted the original fairy tale, so while your point is interesting, it’s really a rebuttal to my argument, which is that the Disney movies have harmful messages.
This has all brought to mind something that has bugged me for a very long time not only about Disney films, but about fantasy film (especially fantasy films for children) in general. This is something that I first started really chewing on back with How to Train Your Dragon, but the Beauty and the Beast discussion is bringing it back to me.
That is to say, I’m arguing (and will continue) that the primary arc of the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast is of the Beast having to change himself in order to show his quality.
However, there’s still a scene toward the end where he has to physicallly defeat an enemy in order to win the day. AKA beast out and kill a monkeyfighter. Still doing the Beast thing, in other words.
I was discussing this same thing about HTTYD 1 (a story which I adored, although not without wistfully thinking that they would never make a story like this about a girl and they really could, almost without changing a word). The story was special in that, among other things, it allowed for surprisingly long stretches of silent ‘acting’ by the characters rather than nonstop verbal exposition, and everybody onscreen had a point of view. (And it was not about gender roles — everybody was expected to pick up a sword and go rampage. The protagonist gets around this not be becoming more gender-stereotyped but by awesome feats of engineering.) No one was completely-dismissable comic relief, and no one was really evil; people acted according to their rational-for-their-value-system beliefs, and when their beliefs changed due to evidence, they behaved differently. There really wasn’t any bad guy… until there was. The story required a fight scene and monster defeat because that’s what they do, so they introduced a monster. In a story about learning that killing your longterm enemies was not the answer. And the protagonist who decries killing becomes the only person we see actually killing a dragon onscreen.
(I’m not discussing HTTYD2, I’m too upset.)
We get Brave, and the story is about a girl (OR HER MOM *stubborn*) and again it’s about coming to understanding and compromise, but in the end the protagonist (MOM :D) has to do some killing for the story to be story properly. Is there any tale that doesn’t do this? We’re discussing fairly epic tales, but I’d settle for non epic ones at this point. Antagonists get offed in Toy Story even, don’t they?
I think in The Croods (I realize two of these examples are not Disney) they managed to not end the tale with enemy death, since the enemy was global change, but that one tricked me by making me think it was the daughter’s film when actually it was the father’s character arc and journey of growth and change.
Mulan fights Shan Yu but has Eddie Murphy Dragon deliver the killing stroke.
So there’s this recurring message in these films that goes “Ultimate Win = enemy death, and this is something boys do to win girls, and if you’re a really strong girl, then we’ll let you do the killing youself, or maybe by proxy if we want to keep you dainty.” But not really an alternative to this narrative.
(There wasn’t enemy death in Frozen, was there. Whew.)
There’s this thread in fantasy of solving problems invariably by killing or by a physical fight that bugs me. “Boy” movie or “girl” movie, when the genre is fantasy the ultimate win comes down to brute force. I don’t think it has to be that way.
I’m still ruminating on this.
@30
Personally I find the fixation on Disneys interpretations rather sad, so looking at the origin of these stories seems more intersting to me. But even if you look at these movies the core of the story seems to remain and I would say its potential message has to be considered. And The Beauty and the Beast is actually one of the fairy tales that do not have a “toxic” message (these obviously also exist, “Der Jude im Dorn” most likely beeing the worst of the lot).
I think it’s valid to talk about both. The original article discusses and critiques Disney specifically, and this is justified I think because Disney has profound international reach and effect. I don’t think we can fully separate the originals, though, because Disney is trying to retell them, “update” them for a modern audience, and even complicate them. (I believe they are in fact trying to complicate, modernize, or even “improve” these tales — whether or not they are successful is another matter altogether.) I think bringing in the originals to compare and ask ourselves whether Disney has been successful in what it’s trying to do is worthwhile.
It is an interesting thing to recognize that Disney introduced the Beast’s having violent behavior. This is a difficult thing to handle deftly especially in a children’s film. I don’t agree that the animated version demonstrates Stockholm Syndrome, but I can certainly see why many people do, and that’s on Disney for introducing that element. On the other hand, the original tale has the idea of the father very directly… selling his daughter — using her as currency, a sacrifice to pay for his own tresspass and theft, as in the Bibilcal tale of Jepthah (Judges 11), and frames it as partly her own fault for requesting a rose. Her father tearfully agrees. Well, this is terrible, and the modern/Western/let’s face it, U.S. audience Disney always aims for first couldn’t stomach it, so the animated version tweaks the scene by having Belle asking for nothing and tracking down her father, and when she offers to take her father’s place, her dad protests and fights and has to be forcefully thrown out with magic, then runs back to town immediately trying to get help to get his daughter back, never accepting this state of affairs. Successful story change? Good enough? Inadequate? Opinions will of course vary, but that is fascinating.
(I’m looking over summaries of both versions now to determine whether what the Beast and his household did was presented as premeditated bait and entrapment. I don’t think it is in the Disney version, but in some versions of the fairy tale it seems to be.)
They do a lot of this tweaking and alteration, and sometimes it helps, but sometimes it doesn’t. But it is interesting.
I’m disappointed. How did you manage to do some background research on Frozen, but not give other tales the same consideration?
Folklore scholars generally agree that Cinderella was not a submissive, two-dimensional character until the twentieth century (when Disney took a shot at telling that story). Did you even bother to research each tale’s history?
I think you are really pulling at straws with some of these and shoving them into a box. Strong women don’t all have to be warriors and the point of the Little Mermaid wasn’t that she threw herself over the boat. In order to save her own life she had to kill the prince because he didn’t chose her. She decided that since she truly loved him she wanted him to be happy even if it wasn’t with her and chose to end her life instead. It was going to be one or the other. You have a very shallow view of what the story is meant to teach.
I still think the original Little Mermaid was way too preachily religious. Sure, she couldn’t kill the prince but her “reward” was to become sea foam and, after performing some large number of good deeds for children, she would get that immortal soul she was after to begin with. Blech. Yes, I had to shatter the illusions of a couple of my nieces when they were very young (like 5 or so) about how Disney changed the endings and in the original stories their favorite characters all died. I also pointed out that princesses in the stories had no real choice: either marry the prince they didn’t know or stay a domestic drudge for the rest of their lives. No real choice there.
As for Peter Pan, my favorite movie when I was a child, I had to watch it recently with a 6-year-old niece who kept on asking questions about the motives behind the behavior of the characters. I don’t recall this film being so full of jealousy. I must have forgotten that Tinkerbell tried to have the Lost Boys kill Wendy and that Peter Pan was an oblivious idiot to ignore all the other female characters who tried to harm Wendy out of jealousy. I guess he just liked the attention. Ech. At least I told my niece that all that jealousy was Peter Pan’s fault, for not recognizing it and for not putting a stop to it.
@35 I’m a post-structuralist, so I believe there is only very rarely just one valid reading or interpretation of a tale. I wouldn’t mark a student down for your beliefs stated here (as long as they hit the word count and argued thoroughly. ;D) So I don’t object to your getting whatever lessons enrich you from the original Mermaid tale — that’s the one you mean, right?
However, everyone comes at a story from their own place, their own life experience. Mine has made me extremely wary of the idea that Person A loving Person B obligates Person B to love them back. (Some people call this the “Nice Guy” trope.) This is a narrative that’s repeated in so many stories,”don’t take no for an answer, just keep pushing,” and it has been very harmful to women in particular (but it should not take place, regardless of sex or gender). Just this year there was an intelligent, promising young woman called Maren Sanchez who was killed because she wouldn’t go to a school dance with a boy who liked her, and instead went with another boy, one that *she* liked. The one she didn’t go with stabbed her. This isn’t Maren’s fault. It isn’t these girls who are unworthy of love or deserving of hurt, and it wouldn’t be noble or a sign of great love for these boys to refrain from hurting them — refraining from hurting them is baseline acceptable behavior. For me, “The Little Mermaid” simply flipping the sexes doesn’t improve it. And Andersen excusing it with “binding magic” doesn’t work for me either.
In my opinion, Andersen’s mermaid started out wrong and should never have made the bargain or worked the spell in the first place. Even the Sea Witch is straightforward and upfront with her. So the fact that it came down to his blood or her tail should never have happened. I can call it a tragedy, or even a horror tale, and I can pity her for getting caught up in the events she set in motion, but I’m never going to like the tale, and I’m not going to uphold her as a paragon for not commiting a horrible act on someone else to fix the situation she got herself into in the first place. No cookie for basic decency.
While I still love many of Andersen’s tales, some of them have a moralizing or classist undercurrent that I disagree with very strongly. A peasant girl gets adopted above her station by a rich woman and gets too proud of her new red shoes, so she’s enchanted to be unable to remove the shoes and to dance until she has to have her feet chopped off to keep from dying, and has to spend her the rest of her life quietly praying. A man loses his shadow in Africa (because of course,Africa must be the source of terrifying sorcery?!??) and the shadow finds him, and — again, in order to gain a soul — sucks the life out of the guy, takes his place, marries his girlfriend, and has him executed when the original guy refuses to become the shadow’s shadow. A love triangle is destroyed by an “Ice Maiden” — she drags the fiance to his death because the woman in the triangle had a DREAM about the other man. This after the Ice Maiden killed the fiance’s mother to begin with, and marked him for death as a baby. These, and a couple of others, are usually referred to as his”dark” tales (in contrast with his lighter ones, such as “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes”). “The Little Mermaid” is traditionally included amongst these dark ones, and really, some of these Andersen tales… aren’t lesson tales. These are self-therapy tales and I feel they tell us far more about Andersen than about what we should be doing with our own lives.
Andersen is a product of his time, of course. But I’m a product of mine, and many of the lessons he teaches do not work in my cultural milieu. (E.g., I don’t know anyone who would consider red shoes to be unforgivably immodest or scandalous in any way, nor a small child’s being pleased with red shoes to warrant punishment.) He’s also a product of his own life (his tales are the work of one guy, as opposed to stories that evolved over time with the input of many people and thus more broadly reflect a culture), and he had some issues that very much come out in his stories. He is recorded as having fallen in love with several people, both female and male according to his writings and letters, who rejected him or “regarded him as a brother”; he did not ever marry; he was not happy about it, and he spent a lot of his time writing fiction in which people who rejected love interests were either killed, punished terribly, or narratively dismissed as bad shallow people. As opposed to autonomous individuals with the right to love whom they please. It is unlikely that this is coincidence.
(This is not to say I think the Disney version is flawless brilliant Shakespeare or anything.)
As for Brave, I have no problem with women being strong in ways other than fighting. I also have no problem with their strength being fighting, either. But “Brave” *can’t decide.* I am not deriding women’s options in the world, I am annoyed with what I saw as inconsistent storytelling in one particular story. Merida’s initial characterization is based on her physicality, her horse riding and proficiency with arrows — but none of this actually serves her in the final conflict. It winds up being window dressing, and her problem isn’t even solved — she says she wants to be the master of her own fate; she doesn’t say “I want a few more years of freedom please and then I’ll marry.” She doesn’t even say “I want to choose my own husband, dangit.” But the option she wanted, of being herself and riding her horse and not having to worry about romance at all, is not gone, it’s just postponed. She still has to marry someone. It’s like the scriptwriters didn’t notice that they had done this. And while she demonstrates so-called power by her mother’s preferred method — speaking well in public — the only reason this works is because she’s the daughter of the chief. This isn’t a universal power. If she or her mother were a scullery maid who stood up nicely and gave good speech, it wouldn’t have worked — and the script doesn’t even acknowledge how classist it’s being. These men listen to her because they respect and are loyal to her father — not because they respect *her* in her own individual right. This is a case of a girl being an extension of the person who has the real power in this society and it’s a man, and he’s a nice man and I like him well enough and I don’t need him dethroned or anything, but I’m not seeing where this is groundbreaking instead of more of the same. They’ve been doing “tomboy princess” stories since Tokugawa-era Japan, and earlier. There’s a whole TV Tropes page. It still all ends up with the very first Pixar girl protagonist’s tale boiling down to “how to be a girl properly/what is an acceptable way to be a girl,” as if that’s the only type of tale, unless its a rom-com, that a girl can star in.
When it becomes Elinor’s tale in my twisted little imagination, however, it becomes a character-driven mother-daughter tale with mom learning not to be so rigid, to take into account her daughter’s needs, to compromise, and to shed the rigidly rule-and-propriety based behavior when the situation calls for it — to be flexible and eat with her fingers in the woods and to have empathy and to let her daughter have the dang bow and arrow. Which is a great story! We get this story all the time within U.S. culture between fathers and sons, so having it between a mom and daughter for a change is fairly new and very delightful. (And yes, I am aware it isn’t really Elinor’s tale and I’m being revisionist, but a girl can dream.)
(And it’s not like I hate it — I still cry buckets in public when they hug.)
However this is my take, based on my experiences and views. Everyone having the same views and getting the exact same thing out of every story would be hella boring, and I would not equate opinion difference with shallowness of character.
@Maac, Have you seen Whip It? It’s Brave on roller skates, and it has the stuff you wish Brave had.
No I haven’t — is that the one with Ellen Page? I missed it. I’ll check it out!
Yes, directed by Drew Barrymore, it’s REALLY good.
@31: You put a finger on something that has long bothered me about fantasy and fairy tales too, and I’ve only just been able to recognize it. I noticed it only when I started trying to write fantasy of my own: I felt the inherent dissonance between the deeper themes I wanted to explore and classical elements of fairy and folk tales I kept drawing from that end up with pretty blatant violence, and was wondering why I kept disliking what I wrote. Not saying that violence in stories is always bad, or isn’t always right for the story, just that it can end up showing up in oddly casual ways sometimes.
@36: Me too, what bothered me greatly about Anderson’s The Little Mermaid was the religious message–an antiquated religious message from a particular time that doesn’t make a lot of sense to modern sensibilities, religious or otherwise. It seemed like the tragedy of the Mermaid’s story was meant to be inevitable: what can you expect from a fundamentally inferior being? How noble of the Merfolk to want souls too! Too bad they just can’t have them, and any attempt to get one is bound to end in misery. Reminds me a lot of the early protestant idea of Predestination. Original Little Mermaid was much more concerned with telling a moral tale about how only some people are pre-chosen for salvation. Without being able to use pursuit of a soul as motivation (because the idea that some have souls and some just don’t doesn’t make much sense to a modern audience), the 80’s Little Mermaid had to come up with something else, and in keeping with general Disney themes anyway, chose pursuit of love.
I will agree though that in Disney’s Mermaid her motives are at least multi-layered: she was already deeply curious about the human world while feeling like a misfit in her own, meeting Eric is the extra thing on top of that that makes her finally act.
I wonder if now is the time, if you could retell The Little Mermaid with her boundless curiosity about a different world being her motivation, without the requirement of “true love” with a human?
Because of all the Little Mermaid talk, I looked up the story plot to Little Mermaid II Return to the Sea.
Talk about the classic “keeping all knowledge from your kids, backfires in a bad way!” story. Especially when one parent has magic in their background.
How many stories are based around that premise?
Harry you are a wizard! Didn’t you know your parents were wizards?
So kid’s ignorance is a major failing in many classic tales too. If parents / family had given the kid a clue in the first place, maybe they would not have handed themselves over to the evil force to begin with.
I think it’s no longer a huge spoiler to say Frozen was trying to do just that, although I think its success at doing so was… heartwarming, but erratic. The characterization was awesome, though.
There was a not-quite-YA book by a fellow called Soman Chainani that I read just before Frozen came out in theaters, which has such similar themes that I suspected Disney of shenanigans for a while (probably not — the two were released far too closely together for outright copying, I think). It’s called “The School for Good and Evil,” I gave it to my niece, and it’s about a group of kids who ultimately try to escape the fairy-tale structure, and does a pretty decent job of deconstructing it. It’s also fairly… dark and sinister. (Students complete challenges and get ranked, and those who fail to princess properly, or don’t prove themselves evil enough, are transformed into minor characters instead. The thing is, “minor character” can include “Candy house that gets eaten” or “Magic shoes” or “Luggage.” Rebellion happens.) The two lead female characters are friends instead of sisters, and their friendship is the thread running under the entire tale. “Pure good” and “pure evil” turn out to be false categories, and I kind of adored this story.
As everything has to nowadays, it’s becoming a trilogy. But I’ve read the second book as well (“A World Without Princes”) and I have faith the final volume will be strong. (Don’t worry, the author is not anti-prince. Tropes get turned on their heads, but the “top student in prince class” also gets a point of view, a layered character, his own problems to solve, and an inner life. The second book polarized things a great deal, but I like to think the series will end with a nice balance.)
(I’ve found myself obsessed with finding books and stories that focus on strong female friendships, lately, without the romance. It’s not easy.)
I’ve encountered several “modernized” retellings of Little Mermaid — unfortunately (in my opinion) they haven’t stopped focusing on the romance, just on making the prince horrible, and revenge.
@42 — I agree about the ignorance. Sometimes I get it, when it’s a question of protecting a child from an alternate reality that is dangerous, and at its best you’ll find stories that question that withholding of information and come down on the side of honesty and appropriate preperation of the child — but sometimes it’s a not-very-good storytelling shortcut to increase tension.
All,
As usual I am late to the party, and I may be putting a period on a topic that has run its course, but given the wonderful (and insightful) discussion I could not let this article pass without making a couple of observations to those of you that took the time to read and discuss.
First and foremost, I accept the criticism that some of my summaries of the individual stories were a bit flip and short. [@34 was particularly pointed in her critique of me in this respect.] Frankly this is more a limitation of the form than of my desire to have a full discussion of each of the stories. My first draft of this article went on and on and on, and I was begged to trim it down–alot! As a result, the summary of the last 70 years or so of Disney is naturally very brief. I may be able to remedy this if Tor will allow me to continue to post articles. Perhaps I can do a survey of some of these stories in depth. In each case I tried to keep the kernel of what I believe to be true about the original source material and Disney’s take on it.
For example, in my view Cinderella is a quintessential damsel in distress story. The only way out for Cinderella is to get someone (preferably the prince) to marry her. So, although magical powers are at her disposal (in Disney’s version via a fairy godmother and in the original via a tree through which she can channel her dead mother’s spirit) she does not use those powers to free herself from the tyranny of her stepmother, but instead uses the power to make herself presentable at the prince’s ball. In both versions, it is the prince, and his proposal of marriage, that frees her from her plight.
Second, in hindsight I think my summary (which originally I wanted to fashion as a sidebar to the article, but we couldn’t figure out the formatting) distracted from the main point. It is not that I think stories like Cinderella or Snow White or Beauty and the Beast don’t have merit, or that Disney’s interpretations are better or worse than the originals, it is just that Disney chose for many years to tell much the same fairytale story (particularly from the girl’s perspective) over and over. I think what I was trying to say in the article is that if you read more broadly from the fairytale canon there is no reason why you would think this must be so. There are a lot of stories (original fairytales) that have lots of different types of female characters. This article was really trying to suggest and encourage everyone to turn to those stories that have not garnered as much attention, and which have VERY different female characters–like Disney did by taking up The Snow Queen.
[As an aside, one poster @17 takes issue with my summary of The Snow Queen. While I agree that Gerda’s quest in the original is directed to restoring her childhood friend Kai to her, it is made clear in their story that they are playmates and NOT romantically involved. And, I must protest that there is no marriage at the end. Actually, the end of the Snow Queen is quite beautiful with Gerda rescuing Kai and then them travelling back the village, hand-in-hand, revisiting all the people that had helped Gerda along the way.]
In terms of specific fairytales, it appears that the two stories that drew the most discussion were Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. I actually had a much fuller discussion of Beauty and the Beast in my last article, “Slarom, the Backward Morals of Fairytales” (http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/09/slarom-the-backward-morals-of-fairytales), and so won’t go into too much detail here except to say that I think the question of whether the Beast was openly threatening to Beauty in the story (he wasn’t in the original) is the wrong question. The Beast’s crime to me is that in forcing Beauty to come to him he implied a threat against both her father and her that was atrocious. I liken it to a kidnapper taking you off the street in a black van to a windowless room in a cellar and then serving you tea. The fact that the tea is nice doesn’t redress how he got you there or the fear you felt on the journey. Even if there is no physical violence, there is violence in the psychological fear induced. In the original story, Beauty and her entire family are certain that the Beast will devour her the instant she arrives, so when she travels to his castle it is an incredibly brave act.
The Little Mermaid I have only ever touched on briefly in my writings and it is because I think there is an entire article that could be devoted to both the original and Disney’s version and whether Disney’s version is better or worse with respect to the main character. I would point this out about the Disney version, whether you believe that Ariel is motivated by her curiosity and that she is inherently an explorer or not, the entire narrative of the story is driven by her need to “get the man.” Indeed, those precious few days she spends with humans are not taken up by discovering the wonders of human life, but instead are entirely consumed by her pursuit of Prince Eric, because absent his kiss she will die and her soul will be taken forever. In this respect, I actually think the original is more liberated. In the original she has dual motivations: to get a soul and to get the prince. In fact, the only reason in the original that she needs the kiss is so a part of the prince’s soul will flow into her. Now I know @Maac and @writelhd have been discussing the heavy-handed religious nature of this message, and I don’t disagree, but from a purely feminist viewpoint at least in the original she has a reason for chasing the boy beyond the obvious romantic consequences. Also, in the original she has another way out: to kill the prince and drip his blood on her feet. This would effect her transformation back to a mermaid, but she chooses to die rather than murder the newlywed prince. Again, there are a number of readings one can make of this requirement, but in the end she chooses death on her own terms to committing a crime against an innocent person. I’m not sure whether we have an equivalently selfless act in Disney’s version. As I said, I think this is a fascinating story to explore, and I hope to do so in a later article.
Finally, I want to thank you all for reading the article and providing such a lively discussion. I am trying to post one of these every week or so, so keep your eye out.
Warmest Regards,
Jack
Apologies for the quick drive-by comment here! (Awesome of you to comment, Jack.)
In my comment at #37, I explain why I very strongly disagree that the original Little Mermaid’s absolute baseline decency abstaining from murder to get herself out of a situation she got herself into in the first place is anything like a “selfless act,” and plays into a larger pattern of demonizing people who reject lovers and deifying unrequited lovers in Anderson’s fiction that I find intensely disturbing.
I do allow that Disney in general tends to focus excessively on love stories (it’s even worse in the French translations — oy). For reasons that still bemuse me, these seem to be the most popular tales, or a plot undercurrent that absolutely must be shoehorned in, even in things that are not straight up love stories, or not by Disney. Team this guy and Team that one, shipping wars, et cetera. I’m totally in favor of more agape and phileos, more plucky bands of Platonic ragtag misfits, and the like. (More Elsas!) But if I must be given a love tale, I’d have to take Disney’s over Andersen’s; I see little to nothing redeeming about his pattern of punishing people, especially women, who do nothing worse than saying, “I’m sorry, I love someone else.” Not being loved back isn’t the equivalent of sainthood — it happens to virtually everyone sooner or later.
@Maac
Thanks for the reply. I love these sorts of discussions.
I just wanted to clarify that I don’t disagree with you on Andersen’s version being worse in totality. It is a brutal story, and at least one commentator I read likened Anderesen to an “emotional terrorist” for having written such a story (and others like the Red Shoes) for children.
I also STRONGLY agree that the prince is in no way a villain, nor should he be criticised for not loving the mermaid. He did not ask her to make the bargain she did, and he certainly never made her a promise that he would love her over all others. In this case the prince then is blameless and he should not have to die for his decision to love another.
However, I disagree that her decision to end herself rather than end the Prince’s life is not at least self sacrificing. Remember in the end she is a mermaid, not a human. In the story mermaids are quite literally souless creatures. In this light the mermaid’s choice not to kill to save herself can be read as a moral evolution.
Now, I say all this knowing that there are many problems with the “moral” of The Little Mermaid, not the least of which being that the mermaid’s redemption at the end was tacked on as a Coda by Andersen after the original publication. The original original version merely had her dying. But, when you read Hans Christian you have to accept such moralizing as part of the package.
Leaving all this aside, what I was trying to say in my comment is that I think I defend the original over Disney’s version because, if you accept the premise that mermaid’s are souless and thus denied an afterlife, the mermaid’s decision to make this truly TERRIBLE bargain in the first place is more understandable. Again, I am not suggesting it is a GOOD decision, it is simply more justified than Ariel’s, which seems so absurd as to render all her other actions suspect.
Again, thanks for the back and forth. The bonus is that this has given me a great motivation to write the Little Mermaid article I’ve always wanted to write.
Jack
I would love to see your Little Mermaid article! Do it! :-)
I do want to point out that the fact that her aims were religious/spiritual would not necessarily absolve her even during Andersen’s time — according to several Christian belief systems of the 19th century her motivations could as easily be read as her rebuking God’s creative decisions and attempting to circumvent them via witchcraft.
According to my contemporary and semi-agnostic beliefs (I’m aware I’m therefore arguing from a very distinct prejudice) her obtaining a soul was in no wise guaranteed to be better than the fate already allotted to her through the plan God already had in place — she had no guarantee of heaven, and an enternity in hell is not better than the oblivion of dissolving into foam and meeting a definite end. What does she want with a soul, to what use does she intend to put it? To improve herself in character? Or simply to avoid oblivion and not end? (There are religious traditions that treat the peace of oblivion as the preferred end goal.) Her obsession reminds me of the religious anorexics of the 16th century — a pyschological issue repurposed to prop up poor theology.
Disney’s mermaid had curiosity and wanderlust as her initial motives — I just find these things purer and more comfortable to defend. (16-year-old hormones and love at first sight I will not so much try to defend, as I don’t actually enjoy love stories at this point, but I do regard it as “what you get from Disney” in exactly the same way “what you get from Andersen” is moralizing — or romantic bitterness disguised as such.)
It’s probably evident that even if I find it silly, the irrational sudden obsession of “I love this nice cute boy” bothers me far less at a visceral level than my perception of Andersen’s mermaid’s thought process, but I can’t use my guts as an argument. :D And it doesn’t make the Disney Mermaid’s decisions something I would approve of in my own teenage child. Maybe if Triton had made them date for a while longer…since he obviously had the power to do the legs thing at will, it could have been like her passport, or space suit, and she could have gone back and forth…
All in all, my favorite version of the story is the poem “…And Although the Little Mermaid Sacrificed Everything…” by Judith Viorst. (Second page — page 60 in the document) It does not reference the religious nature of the original, but it does put forth an excellent strong message against extreme body modification as a tactic for turning unrequited love into requited.
Late to the game, having been on vacation, but I am sad to have missed this one. I have a love hate relationship with Disney movies and have often hoped Tor would do some kind of Disney rewatch.
In the end, I do love Disney movies for the most part, I think they do have positives to be gleaned from them. And I have a big fondness for love stories and romance (and I don’t think it’s any less of a feminist goal to want such things in and of themselves) so usually, when I watch them, that’s what I expect and want out of them. But I think it’s important, as with anything, to watch them with open eyes and also realize the problematic aspects as well, or the assumptions being made. I only have little boys, but they love Disney movies too (including ones typically seen as ‘girl’ movies, like Cinderella) so it’s interesting to see what THEY enjoy from them, as as they get older, it will be interesting to see what messages they are taking from them.
I’ve found the comments incredibly interesting and thought provoking!
Just thought I’d weigh in here. I’ve done my fair share of reading and writing about fairy tales (www.fairytalefandom.com). I agree that it’s about time Disney and the media in general started drawing from a wider variety of tales. However, some of this comes down to interpretation. When you view something through a certain lens, it will always seem negative. For example, the idea always comes up that characters like Snow White, Cinderella and Briar Rose (aka Sleeping Beauty) were rescued by their prince. The thing is, I never really saw any of those three as rescuers. I see them as rewards. As characters, they do so little it’s hard to give them the vaunted status as rescuer. This is a thing that happens in fairy tales regardless of whether the protagonist is male or female. They always end up with a royal spouse as a trophy. And I know that women aren’t trophies in this day and age, but ideally neither are men.
I wonder sometimes if it’s right or realistic to expect tales of long ago to adhere to modern standards. I’m not saying we should get rid of fairy tales, because they’re still awesome in their way. However, there are some things that many of them are not meant to do. It wouldn’t be the first time someone suggested it. Both L. Frank Baum and Carl Sandburg wrote fantastical tales for children because they thought that the old fairy tales weren’t quite fit for the modern American children of the time. Even looking back, many of the things that get criticized today were revolutionary at the time they were written. The fairy tale writers of the French salons were often quite opposed to the idea of arranged marriages, which they saw as antiquated. So they wrote tales that swung in the opposite direction by focusing on love at first sight. Even regarding Disney, the character of Ariel received critical praise at the time of The Little Mermaid’s release for being a princess who went after her prince rather than waiting for her prince to come after her.
And finally I’m also left thinking of how the gender debate always seems to slide to one side. Why is there always a slide toward pushing for active females and placing female characters in roles that were once typically male and not the other way around. Why is it a boon to raise our daughters more like sons but not to raise our sons more like daughters? If we can teach girls that it’s okay to be adventurous and slay the dragon, we should also teach boys that it’s okay to accept help when they really need it and be “rescued”, that kindness can save the day just as well as brute force can or that it’s not “icky” to long for love and companionship. Just a thought.
So, this is just my perspective (from raising two sons, one of whom is a very rowdy, active ‘boyish’ boy – but also loves Cinderella, has an Ariel toothbrush and says Anna is his favorite princess – all this time I thought it was Elsa but he was quick to correct me ;)) is that I think there IS a bit of a movement (at least in some circles) to raise their sons like daughters – but sometimes at the expense of accepting that boys CAN be rowdy, aggressive, etc. Granted, I think we’ve already started to swing away from that extreme, but I’m thinking of the type of parenting that freaks out whenever a boy wants to play with a gun or a stick, expects all kids to sit docilely around a circle, etc. But now there are books coming out that are pointing out the importance of such active, rowdy play as well as accepting that in general (just in general!!) boys don’t really ‘settle’ until about 6ish.
Anyway, in general I’m glad we seem to be moving a bit more towards just accepting kids’ temperaments as individual instead of putting them into boy/girl boxes, and teaching both genders the value of both sets (masculine vs feminine, however you happen to define that) of qualities in a well integrated, balanced person. A person might slant towards one side or the other, but we don’t demean one set or the other.
@50, but sometimes at the expense of accepting that boys CAN be rowdy, aggressive, etc.
Um, girls can too.
@51 – obviously, but we’re talking about boys and the trend (in certain parenting circles) to try to quash those qualities in boys, but while still encouraging them in girls. I’ve seen it before, but thankfully, as I said, it seems to be dying out in favor of just letting kids be kids.
I am a bit more concerned about how men are viewed and treated in the Disney movies especially the princes (poor Aladdin in particular).
the men and boys risk their lives throughout the entire movies just at a chance for happiness (if they fail any task they die), and poor the prince in little mermaid, deceived and manipulated by both the heroine and the antagonist throughout (but a nice flip to the male being passive).
The women merely need to exist to have someone come along and love them, men seem to always be cast as needing to move heaven and earth and still must risk rejection by the princess or heroine. And then on top of it be bashed and criticized for following their heart and risking everything. And all the princess has to do is ‘wait and be passive.’ I’d like to see more of the heroines saving the princes and possibly being rejected by them just to make things ‘fair and balanced/ethical.’